Search: osint vs humint

1. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a sub-discipline of all of the traditional disciplines, as well as a discipline in its own right, but it is closest to Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and should be managed concurrently with HUMINT, which has fifteen slices, only four of which are classified. Treating OSINT as a technical collection task is ignorant and ineffective for the simple reason that at least 80% of what needs to be collected in the OSINT arena is in 183 languages we do not speak, and not at all in digital form.

2. A properly managed intelligence community would have the national intelligence council comprised of top brains from each of the eight tribes of intelligence (academic, civil society, commercial, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit) and a Whole of Government requirements division that is autonomous and replete with integrity that cannot be compromised.

3. Collection management should start with OSINT/HUMINT, and the technical disciplines tasked only when OSINT/HUMINT cannot provide an answer and the requirement is arguably of the most vital importance. This cannot be said for 90% of what is done today with expensive technical collection most of which is never properly processed.

4. Intelligence is on the verge of maturing–instead of denied areas and exaggerated threats to justify the military-industrial complex and its waste–intelligence will henceforth be about all threats, all policies, all demographics, all the time. This is much easier to do that most realize–all it requires is absolute integrity.

* Previewed in draft by Bill Studeman & Joe Markowitz. CIA and DIA and other elements have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars, and this is still the runt in the litter when it should be, as Paul Wallner so ably put it in 1992, “the source of first resort.”